I've installed the deskbar applet recently on my Fedora Core 5 computer. (sudo yum -y install deskbar-applet). It seems to have some problems holding onto focus while I'm typing, but I might end up using it longer term. One thing that I've found is that:

/usr/lib/deskbar-applet/deskbar-applet --help

is good for debugging, since plugins that fail to load might output something to the terminal. I did have to do a few more things to get some of the functionality I wanted. They're described here:

Enabling Google Live Search

1. Download the Google APIs developer's kit and put the GoogleSearch.wsdl file contained therein into ~/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/
2. Create a google account and get your API key mailed to you
3. Put the key in a file called ~/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/Google.key
4. sudo yum -y install SOAPpy
5. restart (logout/login or remove/add the deskbar)
6. Enable google search in the deskbar preferences

Enabling Live Beagle Integration

1. sudo yum -y install libbeagle-python
2. restart (logout/login or remove/add the deskbar)
3. Enable "Beagle Live" in the deskbar preferences
   

Patching Bug 335499

1. Get 2.14.2 from http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/GNOME/sources/deskbar-applet/2.14/
2. Get and install the 2.14.0 source rpm from http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/5/SRPMS/
3. Edit /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/deskbar-applet.spec to change version to 2.14.2 and release to 0%{?dist}
4. Remove the second patch line from the spec file (in 2 places)
5. rpmbuild -ba deskbar-applet.spec
6. install the produced RPM